home Boilers Canadian scientists claim that they have unraveled the mystery of the Voynich manuscript. Sensation! Scientists have deciphered the beginning of the mysterious Voynich manuscript Deciphering the Voynich manuscript using Slavic writing

Canadian scientists claim that they have unraveled the mystery of the Voynich manuscript. Sensation! Scientists have deciphered the beginning of the mysterious Voynich manuscript Deciphering the Voynich manuscript using Slavic writing

The collection of the Yale University Library (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich Manuscript. There are many sites dedicated to this document on the Internet; it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.
The manuscript is named after its former owner, the American bookseller W. Voynich, the husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel “The Gadfly”). The manuscript was purchased in 1912 from one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. the owner of the manuscript was the then German Emperor Rudolf II. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is believed to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. Based on the characteristics of the paper and ink, it dates back to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

This book, measuring 22.5 x 16 cm, contains coded text in a language that has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in fluent calligraphic handwriting using a quill pen and five colors of ink: green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but mostly they are hieroglyphs that have not yet been found in any other book.

Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the text of the manuscript can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagoric. And the accompanying text is carefully divided into equal paragraphs. The second, astronomical section is designed similarly. It contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and various constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, decorate the so-called biological section. It seems that it explains the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body. The astrological section is replete with images of magical medallions, zodiac symbols and stars. And in the medical part, there are probably recipes for treating various diseases and magical tips.

Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women and spirals of stars. Experienced cryptographers, when trying to decipher text written in unusual scripts, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they carried out a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various symbols, selecting a suitable language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic were suitable. The search continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian, and Turkish... In vain!

The short words of the manuscript are reminiscent of some of the languages of Polynesia, but even here nothing came of it. Hypotheses arose about the alien origin of the text, especially since the plants do not look like those familiar to us (although they are very carefully drawn), and the spirals of stars in the 20th century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what was said in the text of the manuscript. John Dee himself was also suspected of a hoax - he supposedly created not just an artificial alphabet (there actually was one in Dee’s works, but it had nothing in common with the one used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, research has reached a dead end.

History of the manuscript.

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual similarity to any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only “clue” for determining the age of the book and its origin is the illustrations. In particular, the clothes and decoration of women, as well as a couple of castles in the diagrams. All details are typical for Europe between 1450 and 1520, so the manuscript is most often dated to this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.

The earliest known owner of the book was Georg Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague at the beginning of the 17th century. Baresh, apparently, was also puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Having learned that Athanasius Kircher, a famous Jesuit scholar of the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (as was then believed) Egyptian hieroglyphs, he copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking help decipher it. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher, discovered in modern times by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known mention of the Manuscript.

It remains unclear whether Kircher responded to Baresch's request, but it is known that he wanted to buy the book, but Baresch probably refused to sell it. After Bares' death, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi supposedly sent it to Kircher, his longtime friend. His 1666 cover letter is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally purchased for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who believed the book to be the work of Roger Bacon.

The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal State to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate a large amount of property from the Church, including the library. According to the research of Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of university employees, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and apparently there was also the Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, then head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university.

Bex's library was moved to Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati, a large palace near Rome acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

In 1912, the Roman College needed funds and decided to sell part of its property in the strictest secrecy. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, including the one that now bears his name. In 1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow, Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly), to another bookseller, Hanse P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.

So, what do our contemporaries think of this manuscript?

For example, Sergei Gennadyevich Krivenkov, a candidate of biological sciences, a specialist in the field of computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdiya Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. Petersburg), consider the following as a working hypothesis: the compiler is one of Dee’s rivals in intelligence activities, who encrypted, Apparently, recipes in which, as is known, there are many special abbreviations, which provide short “words” in the text. Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears... Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly composed the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious “unearthly” plants are depicted in the pictures? It turned out that they were...composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to the leaf of a lesser-known, but equally poisonous plant called hoofweed. And so it is in many other cases. As we see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants there were rose hips and nettles. But also... ginseng.

From this it was concluded that the author of the text traveled to China. Since the vast majority of plants are European, I traveled from Europe. Which influential European organization sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer is known from history - the Jesuit Order. By the way, their largest station closest to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, also first worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, pressure was put on the emperor through the papal nuncio to expel Dee). So the paths of the expert on poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, then was sent back by courier (the mission itself remained in China for many years), and then worked in Krakow, could well have crossed the paths of John Dee. Competitors, in a word...

As soon as it became clear what many of the “herbarium” pictures meant, Sergei and Klavdia began reading the text. The assumption that it mainly consists of Latin and occasionally Greek abbreviations was confirmed. However, the main thing was to reveal the unusual code used by the formulator. Here we had to remember many differences both in the mentality of people of that time, and about the features of the encryption systems of that time.

In particular, at the end of the Middle Ages, they were not at all involved in creating purely digital keys to ciphers (there were no computers then), but very often they inserted numerous meaningless symbols (“dummies”) into the text, which generally devalued the use of frequency analysis when deciphering a manuscript. But we managed to find out what is a “dummy” and what is not. The compiler of poison recipes was no stranger to “black humor.” So, he clearly did not want to be hanged as a poisoner, and the symbol with an element reminiscent of a gallows, of course, is not readable. Numerology techniques typical of that time were also used.

Ultimately, under the picture with belladonna and hoofed grass, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on preparing a deadly poison... The abbreviations characteristic of recipes and the name of the god of death in ancient mythology (Thanatos, brother of the god of sleep Hypnos) came in handy here. Note that when deciphering it was possible to take into account even the very malicious nature of the alleged compiler of the recipes. So the research was carried out at the intersection of historical psychology and cryptography; we also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the box opened...

Of course, to fully read the entire text of the manuscript, and not its individual pages, would require the efforts of an entire team of specialists. But the “salt” here is not in the recipes, but in revealing the historical mystery.

What about star spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case - that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very harmful to health.

So, apparently, galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here...

And scientist Gordon Rugg from the University of Keeley (UK) came to the conclusion that the texts of the strange book of the 16th century may well turn out to be gobbledygook. Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?

A mysterious 16th-century book may turn out to be elegant nonsense, says a computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan-era spy techniques to reconstruct the Voynich manuscript, which has baffled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.

Using spy technology from the time of Elizabeth the First, he was able to create a likeness of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for more than a hundred years. “I think counterfeiting is a likely explanation,” Rugg says. “Now it’s the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation.” The scientist suspects that the book was made for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II by the English adventurer Edward Kelly. Other scientists consider this version plausible, but not the only one.

“Critics of this hypothesis noted that the “Voynic language” is too complex for nonsense. How could a medieval forger produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to reproduce many of these remarkable characteristics of Voynich using a simple encoding device that existed in the 16th century. The text generated by this method looks like Voynich, but is pure nonsense, without any hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support a long-standing theory that the document may have been concocted by the English adventurer Edward Kelly to deceive Rudolf II.
In order to understand why it took so much time and effort from qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, we need to talk about it in a little more detail. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, it will differ from a deliberate forgery in its complex organization, noticeable to the eye and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into detailed linguistic analysis, many letters in real languages occur only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is almost impossible to forge text with low entropy manually - and we are talking about the 16th century.

No one has yet been able to show whether the language in which the text is written is cryptography, a modified version of some existing language, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any existing language - for example, the two or three repetitions of the most common words - which supports the nonsense hypothesis. On the other hand, the distribution of word lengths and the way letters and syllables are combined are very similar to those found in real languages. Many believe that this text is too complex to be a simple forgery - it would take some crazy alchemist many years to get it so correct.

However, as Wragg showed, such text is quite easy to create using a ciphering device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This lattice is a table of symbols, words from which are formed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty table cells allow you to compose words of different lengths. Using syllable-table grids from the Voynich manuscript, Wragg constructed a language with many, although not all, of the manuscript's distinctive features. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of a manuscript, a scientist needs to use such a technique to recreate a fairly large passage from it. Rugg hopes to achieve this through grid and table manipulation.

It appears that attempts to decipher the text failed because the author was aware of the peculiarities of the encodings and designed the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but was not amenable to analysis. As NTR.Ru notes, the text contains at least the appearance of cross-references, which are what cryptographers usually look for. The letters are written in such a variety of ways that scientists cannot determine how large the alphabet is in which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text based on clothing.

In 1919, a reproduction of the Voynich manuscript came to the professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Roman Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had wide-ranging interests, many of which had an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the manuscript text, Newbould spotted microscopic symbols of shorthand writing and began deciphering them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result was secondary text using 17 different letters. Newbould then doubled all the letters in the words except the first and last, and subjected a special substitution to words containing one of the letters “a”, “c”, “m”, “n”, “o”, “q”, “t” , "u". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with a single letter, according to a rule that he never made public.

In April 1921, Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to a scientific audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all time. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the discoveries of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications concern the "mystery of novae."

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of novae and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source superior to the hydrogen bomb and so simple to handle that a man of the 13th century could figure it out is precisely the secret that the solution to which our civilization does not need, - wrote physicist Jacques Bergier on this occasion. “We somehow survived, and only because we managed to contain the hydrogen bomb tests.” If there is a possibility of releasing even more energy, it is better for us not to know it or not to know it yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding supernova explosion.”

Newbould's report created a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion on the validity of the methods he used to transform the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results obtained. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the manuscript's drawings probably depict epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of kilometers to ask Newbould to use Bacon's formulas to drive out the evil tempting spirits that had taken possession of her.

There were also objections. Many did not understand the method that Newbold used: people were not able to compose new messages using his method. After all, it is quite obvious that a cryptographic system must work in both directions. If you know a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with its help, but also encrypt new text. Newbold is becoming increasingly vague, increasingly less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 under the title The Roger Bacon Cipher. American and English historians involved in the study of the Middle Ages treated it with more than restraint.

However, people have uncovered much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone solved this one?

According to one Manley, the reason is that “attempts at decipherment have hitherto been made on the basis of false assumptions. We actually do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language is used to encrypt it. When the correct hypotheses are developed, the cipher may appear simple and easy...”

It is interesting, based on which version stated above, the research methodology at the American National Security Agency was based. After all, even their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s worked on deciphering it. Frankly speaking, I can’t believe that such a serious organization was working on the book purely out of sporting interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret agency is so famous. However, their efforts were also unsuccessful.

It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technologies, the medieval rebus remains unsolved. And it is unknown whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work by one of the forerunners of modern science.

Now this one-of-a-kind creation is stored in the library of rare and rare books at Yale University and is valued at $160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone: anyone who wants to try their hand at decoding can download high-quality photocopies from the university website.

The collection of the library of Yale University (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich manuscript ( Voynich Manuscript). There are many sites dedicated to this document on the Internet; it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript is named after its former owner - the American bookseller W. Voynich, the husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel "The Gadfly"). The manuscript was purchased in 1912 from one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. the owner of the manuscript was the then German Emperor Rudolf II. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is believed to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. Based on the characteristics of the paper and ink, it dates back to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

History of the manuscript.

Bex's library was moved to Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati, a large palace near Rome acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

So, what do our contemporaries think of this manuscript?

What about star spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case - that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very harmful to health.

So, apparently, galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here...

“Critics of this hypothesis noted that the “Voynic language” is too complex for nonsense. How could a medieval forger produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to reproduce many of these remarkable characteristics of Voynich using a simple encoding device that existed in the 16th century. The text generated by this method looks like Voynich, but is pure nonsense, without any hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support a long-standing theory that the document may have been concocted by English adventurer Edward Kelly to deceive Rudolf II.
In order to understand why it took so much time and effort from qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, we need to talk about it in a little more detail. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, it will differ from a deliberate forgery in its complex organization, noticeable to the eye and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into detailed linguistic analysis, many letters in real languages occur only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is almost impossible to forge text with low entropy manually - and we are talking about the 16th century.

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of novae and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source superior to the hydrogen bomb and so simple to handle that a man of the 13th century could figure it out is precisely the secret that the solution to which our civilization does not need,” wrote physicist Jacques Bergier on this occasion. “We somehow survived, and only because we managed to contain the hydrogen bomb tests.” If there is a possibility of releasing even more energy, it is better for us not to know it or not to know it yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding supernova explosion.”

However, people have uncovered much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone solved this one?

What else would I remind you of that is mysterious, well, for example, or The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -

Scientists from various fields have been struggling to unravel the contents of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript for more than a century. Recently, professor of linguistics from the University of Bedfordshire Stephen Bax, as well as American botanist Arthur Tucker from the University of Delaware and programmer Rexford Tolbert managed to lift the veil on the mystery.

The manuscript, according to some information, was acquired by the famous antiquarian and second-hand bookseller Mikhail-Wilfried Voynich (husband of the writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of the famous Gadfly in Russia) from the Italian Jesuits. After the death of the Voynich couple, it ended up in the Yale University library, where it remains to this day.

The manuscript consists of 246 parchment pages measuring 17 by 24 centimeters, filled with calligraphic handwriting, and contains rather carelessly done color illustrations, as well as images of stars and zodiac symbols. The book contains about 400 painted drawings depicting various plants, but until recently none of them could be identified. But the most important thing is that no one could say in what language the book was written!

From the accompanying letter it followed that the manuscript was purchased at the end of the 16th century by the King of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) Rudolf II, who was fond of occult sciences. After that, it changed hands more than once until it ended up with Voynich.

Many researchers have since struggled to decipher the texts of the medieval manuscript, but to no avail... Although somehow the contents of the book were somehow systematized. So, judging by the drawings, the manuscript consists of five parts. The first is devoted to botany, the second to cosmology, the third to human biology, the fourth to pharmaceuticals, and the fifth to astrology.

The texts are written in a font, which, according to various sources, contains from 19 to 28 letters. Although it contains characters similar to Greek and Latin letters, Hebrew hieroglyphs, and Arabic numerals, it is not possible to attribute the text to any known alphabet or sign system.

Professional cryptographers, and very high-class ones at that, tried to read the text. But the “clues” they found did not fit the book as a whole. Therefore, a version was put forward that the text was not just encrypted, but was originally created in different languages.

English linguist Stephen Bax tried to identify proper names in the book. He believed that they were encoded under the guise of mysterious plants and stars. Previously, some Egyptian hieroglyphs were identified using the same method. The scientist tried to use the resulting “names” to decipher the remaining letters. So, Bucks announced, he was able to identify in the text the name of the constellation Taurus, as well as the word “Kantairon”, which, as he assures, the author designated the medieval herb centaury.

And researchers Arthur Tucker and Rexford Tolbert came to the conclusion that the manuscript contains fragments in the Aztec language and talks about the flora and fauna of the New World. By the way, a similar assumption was put forward earlier. So, in 1944, a botanist named Hugh O'Neill "discovered" images of American sunflowers and red peppers on the pages of a book. From this he concluded that the manuscript was written no earlier than 1493, when Christopher Columbus brought the first sunflowers from the New World to the Old seeds... But later it turned out that in fact the "red" pepper was green, and the "sunflower" had an oval shape. Apparently, the "researcher" had bad eyes...

As for Tucker and Tolbert, they decided to compare the plant images in the book with drawings from several so-called “floristic codes” of the New World, compiled in the mid-16th and early 17th centuries. Thus, on one of the pages of the Voynich Manuscript a plant is depicted with a flat rhizome, from which claw-shaped processes extend, and white flowers with a tubular corolla, almost identical to the plant from the Cruz-Badianus codex of 1552. They both resemble the bindweed Ipomoea murucoides in appearance. Also, one of the drawings, according to the authors of the study, depicts a leaf or fruit of a cactus, most likely Opuntia ficus-indica. And the signature under it looks like “Nahuatl” (“cactus” in Aztec).

In total, scientists say, they were able to identify 37 of the 303 plants presented in the manuscript, as well as six animals and one mineral, which turned out to be boleite. They suggest that the book is actually a description of a medieval botanical garden or reserve, possibly located in central Mexico. This means there is nothing particularly mysterious about it...

Scientists from the University of Alberta in Canada have deciphered the beginning of the Voynich manuscript using artificial intelligence. CBCNews reports this.

According to one of the researchers, Greg Kondrak, the first step was to find out what language the manuscript was written in. To do this, scientists took the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, translated into 380 languages, and using complex statistical procedures were able to develop an algorithm that recognized the language of the document with an accuracy of 97 percent. Using the same algorithm to read the Voynich manuscript, they found out that it was written in Hebrew.

The mysterious manuscript has not yet been deciphered; it is unclear who created the book and for what purpose. Scientists have been trying to uncover the secrets of this document for centuries...

Thus, according to the conclusions of the computer algorithm, the first sentence of the artifact is: “She gave advice to the priest, the owner of the house, me and the people.”

The first 72 words, according to scientists, can relate to plant pharmacology, in this section there are terms such as “farmer”, “light”, “air” and “fire”.

Kondrak emphasizes that although artificial intelligence has done a lot of work, it cannot be done without humans - a living mind is needed to understand the syntax and semantic connections of words. In particular, Hebrew specialists, historians and cryptographers are needed.

The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval work written in the 15th century by unknown authors. Researchers have been trying to decipher it for several hundred years, but no one knows the language of the manuscript. The artifact was discovered by antiquarian Wilfried Voynich in the ancient southern European castle of Villa Mondragone.

There are mysteries in the world that have remained unsolved for centuries, despite the efforts of hundreds, or even thousands of specialists. One of these secrets is probably the most amazing treatise in the world - the Voynich manuscript. No matter who tried to decipher it, no matter what versions the researchers offered, it was all in vain: the text of the mysterious manuscript has stubbornly kept its secret for more than five hundred years.

However, a rather interesting version of the decoding of the manuscript was proposed by the famous writer, paleoethnographer Vladimir DEGTYAREV.

- Vladimir Nikolaevich, so what does the Voynich manuscript tell about? What opinions are there on this matter?

Some say that this is an encrypted alchemical text that figuratively describes ways to prolong life. Others call this document a medical book for a certain European ruler. Well, still others generally believe that this manuscript is just someone’s mockery, which contains a set of meaningless graphic characters. By the way, it is not difficult to see the text of the manuscript itself; it has long been placed on the World Wide Web - the Internet.

- And yet it has not yet been deciphered...

High-level specialists - CIA and NSA cryptographers - tried to read the manuscript. The world's most powerful computer was even connected for this purpose. But in vain. Let me remind you: the book has four illustrated sections. The color drawings depict plants, naked women, the insides of the human body, some diagrams and even a map of a section of the starry sky. In fact, half of the information is quite clear because it is illustrated.

- What do these drawings and diagrams mean? What is the book ultimately about?

REFERENCE: The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book written about 600 years ago by an author whose name has not been preserved by history. The text of the book is either encrypted or written in an unknown language using an unknown alphabet. As a result of radiocarbon dating of the manuscript, it was precisely established that the book was written between 1404 and 1438. They have repeatedly tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but so far to no avail. The book got its name thanks to the bibliophile from Kaunas, Wilfried Voynich, who bought it in 1912. Today the manuscript is in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.

The illustrations tell about a person, or more precisely, about how a person can live no less than the 120 years measured out to him by God. Of course, you can’t claim more, but it’s possible to live 120 years in full health, in your mind and memory. This is what is written about in the ancient manuscript. More precisely, this is one of the “storylines” of this completely scientific work.

Moreover, the “plot” of the book suggests a possible extension of life to three hundred years... Why such a figure was chosen, I will not say, but the formula “Being the elder of a family in twenty generations” directly speaks of the number 300. The time when the manuscript was created was different from ours in that one generation was considered a period of 15 years. Today we think differently: one generation is 25 years.

Do you mean to say that you have read the manuscript? Or did they simply make such an approximate conclusion based on the universal desire of people for longevity?

I only read a few pages of the manuscript, chosen at random from the Internet, because I needed to get some information about the plants that interested me. More precisely, about the line of plants that is depicted at the beginning of the manuscript.

- What language was the Voynich manuscript written in, if you managed to read it?

It turns out that the manuscript was written not in any particular language, but in a common language. This is the proto-language of our civilization, and it is hundreds of thousands of years old. It is important to remember that the book was not born 600 years ago - it was copied onto paper from linen scrolls or from layers of tanned leather. And it was also copied onto those same skins or linen scrolls - probably from clay tables or from palm leaves, and this happened around the 1st century according to the current calendar.

I realized that the rhythm of the writing does not suit the 1/6 folio sheets of paper on which the current text of the manuscript is transferred. After all, the style of writing, even of a strictly documentary nature, always depends on the size of the writing material. And the Voynich manuscript is not a strict document. This is most likely a scientific essay, a kind of diary of the development of an action according to the scenario of a certain scientific search. It seems that much earlier the text of this manuscript was executed on sheets of material that were elongated in length and not in height.

- So what is this text about?

Today there is a popular hypothesis that someone in the 15th century sat over three hundred blank sheets of expensive parchment and diligently wrote on them various meaningless curlicues with no less expensive ink. Then he painted almost a thousand pictures and decorations with different, also extremely expensive, paints. However, there were no futurists, imagists or abstractionists in that era - if they appeared, they were quickly sent to the fires of the Inquisition.

So it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to create such a high-class abstraction. From time immemorial people have written a lot. One should not think that after the Flood there was complete illiteracy and it continued until the 19th century. For example, in the 17th century, a simple mediocre Belarusian merchant wrote in Old Church Slavonic, but... in Arabic letters. And nothing. His cash receipt for one hundred and fifty thalers was considered fair and was accepted into action...

I will not describe exactly the process of decoding three pages of this manuscript because of the complexity of the explanations. I can only tell you about my general impression. The manuscript used three languages: Russian, Arabic and German. But they are written in a certain alphabet, unknown in the world of scientists. Although in fact this alphabet is found much more often than one might think.

Last year, I specifically communicated with people who spoke African dialects. In the conversation, I cited two words from the Voynich manuscript: “unkulun-kulu” and “gulu.” They translated to me that it is “the one who came first” and “the sky”. This is a modern interpretation of very ancient East African concepts, the original meaning of which is “one who stands above all (slaves)” and “blue doom”. In general - “God” and “Death”. The last concept “gulu” (Si Gulu) refers to uranium, the same one that is used to stuff nuclear charges.

- But the book depicts plants. What does uranium have to do with the exotic flower or mushroom ergot?

A solution or infusion of ergot in very small quantities apparently acted as an antidote. People in those days lived very far from London and Paris. And in the Sahara, the dust carried radioactive particles, a kind of “blue salt” that wiped off a person’s skin. So ergot could well be used as an ointment against ulcers that appear on the body... Do you know what at all times was the most precious knowledge in Egypt, China, and Europe? Not a Fibonacci number, not an electric battery, not a method of producing kerosene from oil. The secret of longevity is what cost a lot of money. People paid a lot of money even for the most fantastic recipe. Imagine what would happen if you gave this elixir of youth to the world. No, it would be better if it remains a secret.